


The Upper Hand

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Birthday Spanking, Drug Use, F/M, Female Sherlock Holmes, Fluff and Angst, Romance, Sibling Incest, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 20:17:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Mycroft Holmes spanked his little sister, and one time he kissed her instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written before/Not compliant with S2. AU without John Watson. Unconsummated incest.
> 
> No dubcon or non con, nothing close to machismo: the title is fairly ironical.
> 
> (It's a romance. No, really, it is. Well, call it a slightly bumpy sentimental journey.)

_There were, indeed, sometimes blows; but love gave them, not anger; they were the marks of tenderness._  
Abelard,  _Confessions_.  
 

  
  
1\. Midsummer, with Mummy’s white garden rippling before his eyes in a haze of heat.

Mummy has taken cover in her room and migraine, presenting her brow to Mycroft’s kiss before it was duly cooled with cologne. His sister is out of sight – probably locked in one of her endless verbal fisticuffs with Nanny Ann ("I know only one definition of kidnapping, young lady, one that takes place right after lunch and in your bedroom").  
   
He is the man of the house; barely eighteen; glaring back at the summer which holds him willy-nilly away from that perfect little jaunt to Vienna with BeePee and BeePee's friend whose father is a name at the FO. Instead, he is to stay and "look after your mother" (Father), "watch over Sherlock" (Mummy), and watching isn't his thing, really, his thing is to be subtle and dashing and meet the right people and —  
   
And dashing he is, all over Mummy's dwarf sweet peas, in his haste to rescue Sherlock from an anthill. The ants are red in tooth and claw: Sherlock's bare arms already show the marks of their ire. She is still clinging to an empty jam pot when Mycroft sets her on the ground to brush the ants off her shorts and Tee, checking for more enemies.  
   
"Why d'you have to spoil!" Sherlock's tones, never dulcet at the best of times, match her efforts to bat his hands away. "I need to collect formic acid - the book says it turns red into blue. Why can’t all of you leave me al — ow! You big beast! OW!"  
   
But Mycroft has twirled her around, tucked her under his elbow, and is busy exacting swift but precise retribution on the one part of Sherlock he's pretty sure was spared by the ants. Once, twice, thrice. Resonant swats, that will sting less durably than the angry red marks on her arms but might impress upon his little sister the importance of Not Messing With Mycroft. Or predators.  
   
He releases her and watches as she trots back towards the house, rubbing her palms across the seat of her shorts. The sweet peas are beyond resurrection, but at some point between the dash and the twirl his summer spleen has abated. As he turns back to the main path, side-stepping the enemy, he makes a mental note to return later with a pot of boiling water – and tell Sherlock about litmus paper at supper, when they're back on speaking terms.

* * *

  
   
2\. Midwinter, with little peace or good will at the Holmes estate.

Granted, Christmas has always been a bit of a chore, even when Father was still there to haul up Sherlock so she could set the star on top of the tree, or smuggle an extra dollop of brandied apple onto his firstborn's plate. And now that Mycroft's visits are spaced out (because Oxford is a merry-go-round of facts and thrills and chances, and Mycroft will ride that ride out) he finds that home slows him down.  
   
Or would, if it were not for Sherlock.  
   
Mycroft doesn’t quite know what to make of Sherlock. She is astoundingly intelligent in a raw, unchannelled way, connecting this to that all day through, just as BeePee says he can fuse atomic kernels in a brand new way, and exuding as much malignant heat in the end. Two schools have regretfully declined to keep her – in one, she climbed the roofs at night "to see the shape of the tiles"; in the other, she refused flatly to play at the school’s concert and made an uncalled-for deduction connecting the Music Teacher’s phobia of yellow and giggle incontinence.  
   
"What are you reading?"  
   
"Nothing that would interest you."  
   
"Why don’t you take a walk if you think you're overweight? I saw you at lunch, skipping pudding. But you kept buttering your rolls, ugh. Greedyguts."  
   
Mycroft turns a page ostentatiously. The corner of his eyes hooks a passing view of Sherlock pacing the library, hands bunched into the pockets of her slacks, five feet of offended coltishness and perpetual moue.  
   
"You’re cornering that page because you want to impress Uncle Cecil with your stats. He won’t care, he’s pissed because Aunt Lilian missed her bridge club twice in a row and won't say why. I know, but I’m not telling either. Stats and fats, if that’s all Oxford is about, I’m  _so_  not going there."  
   
Mycroft has to bite the inside of his cheek to refrain from laughing. "Ah, I’ll be sure to pass on the good news. They can do without a hoity-toity little miss who still asks Nanny Ann to do up her laces for her."  
   
He waits, knowing that she’ll pause at that. The muffled crack tells him she’s stepped on the rug covering the more ancient side of the floor, three inches to his left.  
   
"You’ll be asking her soon enough. The way you gorge yourself, I can’t tell your backside from your —."  
   
He pounces, then, flinging the book aside and catching both her arms to pull her over his lap before she can jump back. Sherlock is writhing like an incensed eel in his grasp, but she's no match against four years of punting and the first slap makes her gasp. She is more lines than curves yet, but Mycroft is of the persevering school.  
   
"This is where we differ, sister dear. Let me show you how I, for one, can tell your backside from your tummy."  
   
He lifts his hand again, higher and higher, with a rush of exhilaration – not only because they've stored too much nervous energy, the two of them, and this is a blessed outlet, but because this is connection. This, however ridiculous, is fusion. It has been years since Sherlock, who is more a Holmes than a Vernet, allowed anyone to hug her and if it takes a spanking to show her that he's come home for her, not for buttered toast and high-ranking uncles, so be it. Mycroft laughs as he shifts to another rhythm, lighter, faster, letting the pads of his fingertips hit each round cheek in turn while her feet drum a similar tattoo on the old oak floor.  
   
"Who told me to exercize?" he is saying loudly when the library door opens to usher in Mummy, Uncle Cecil, Aunt Lilian, a few Holmes collaterals, the vicar and Nanny Ann.  
  
Mycroft’s arm freezes mid-swoop and Sherlock tumbles out of his lap.  
   
This time, she does not run away. She looks him in the face – they have the same grey eyes, "Dover sky grey" (Father), but hers are stark staring bright under the mutinous fringe.  
   
"Do that again to me and I'll kill you," she hisses with quiet venom, and pushes past their impromptu audience.  
   
Mycroft’s hand feels like an enlarged pincushion, but it speaks much for his future career that he can rise and hold it out to Uncle Cecil without so much as a blush.  
   
"Sorry about the ruckus, Mummy. She's a bit of a brat, that sister of mine."  
   
"Mycroft," Mummy whispers, and he can see that she is upset. "She’s  _fifteen_."  
   
He doesn’t see Sherlock for the rest of the holiday. In fact, he doesn’t see much of Sherlock for the next three years, the greater part of which are spent within a quartet of walls and their dark-tinted windows. Sometimes the walls are papered with grave books and the floor creaks under his chair legs. Mycroft wonders why his breath tightens at the sound and what causes the tingle in his writing hand. He flexes it briefly and resumes his task.  
   
The years pass.

* * *

  
   
3\. Mid-Spring in Cambridge, the deep blue air crackling with zest, jollity and firelights. Mycroft tightens his arm round his sister’s waist as their feet draw smooth figures of eight on the marquee floor, swinging her round a corner pat when a grinning avatar of Bertie Wooster raises his arm to cut in.  
   
"Age twenty-two," Mycroft hums in tune with the waltz, "City man’s son, Dad a banker, son a gay dog, a shaggy dog, can’t let him, dance with you."  
   
Sherlock’s whooping laugh is a thing of joy and a palpable clue to the number of cups she’s drunk since their first dance. But Mycroft says he is the toast of the day, if only for having convinced her to attend Trinity’s May Ball after all.  
   
Sherlock’s third Cambridge year he will, in years still to come, remember as their speaking year. Granted, their dialogue runs by fits and starts - her texts delayed until his plane enters the small grey hours of the GT zone, his birthday call curtailed by UNO’s latest tantrum. But it never runs dry.  
   
He suspects that she has few, if any, partners in talk. Her Chemistry tutor thinks she's very bright but communally challenged. Sherlock explains that "communally challenged" means uninterested in disco partying and prone to dissect a dead mallard in the gyp room. Mycroft goes for the money shot and asks if the male community is worth a challenge or two. Sherlock sends a reluctant text to the effect that the odds are good, but the goods find her odd. Mycroft types back "all for the best" — then, on imperceptible second thoughts, deletes his text.  
   
June is looming up on the year’s horizon when Sherlock texts that she’s coming home early. Mycroft, now a dab hand at secret coding, reads the text as "May Day".  
   
 _Oh no you don’t. Where's your sense of challenge? M._  
   
 _Balls to the ball is at best an insipid answer, dear girl. M._  
   
 _And it stops being convention if you spike the rules. M._  
   
 _See it as a study in disguise. M._  
   
 _Or a lark. M._  
   
 _Excellent. I’ll take care of everything. M._  
   
And he does. The gown is his assistant’s choice, a French flamenco affair in red silk whose cost probably stretches across half his entertainment expenses. Sherlock takes one look at it, another at the make-up samples thoughtfully provided by Anthea and locks herself in her tiny bathroom. When she comes out, Mycroft is deftly knotting his white tie before her window.  
   
He sees her reflection first – red, pale and black, a woman stepping out of a German fairy tale – and turns slowly to greet this... girl, woman, sister, stranger and tonight’s accomplice in their little deception game.  
   
"Problem?" Sherlock asks defensively.  
   
Mycroft turns round, smiles and offers his arm.  
   
The evening is a triumph. There are two dons and three fathers to avoid, but Mycroft’s incognito is hardly under threat. Once warmed up with champagne, Sherlock rises to the challenge and flirts brazenly with "Victor Trevor" ( _To the victors the spoils_ , his first mentor’s pet quote). "Victor" plies Sherlock with strawberries and compliments, dances every dance worth the name with her and mesmerizes her age peers with his drawl, chic, ballroom dancing skills and a few reliable tips on Prince William.  
   
And keeps Sebastian Wilkes, the Wodehouse puppet, at bay along with all the other goods.  
   
One o’clock finds them on the deserted riverbank, spinning each other around to the distant sound of fireworks and giggling insanely together.  
   
"That," Sherlock gasps as she plumps down on the grass and kicks off her evening sandals, "was amazing."  
   
Mycroft lowers himself gingerly at her side. "Hmm. That was a belated gift."  
   
"What d'you mean, a g — oh. Pffft. As if birthdates mattered. So I was born in January, so what? Would it make any difference if it was tomorrow or October like you?  
   
"To me? Yes. Your twenty-first birthday, and I wasn’t even home at Christmas."  
   
Sherlock rolls on her side, looking up at him under her darkened eyelashes. "We didn’t celebrate at all. Mother had a headache and I'm not one for cakes and tralala, you know that."  
   
Mycroft bends down to brush his nose against hers – fine-boned noses, ending on the same fastidious tip. Sherlock rubs back in silence, raising her face to him. She's smelling of grass and mild summer sweat and his own cologne and, as he rests his nose against her cheekbone, Sherlock.  
   
"Well, there are other ways of celebrating."  
   
"We don’t have any candles. Or ribbons. Or – thank god for that – relatives."  
   
Mycroft chuckles against her cheek. "I could think of another tradition, sister mine. But you did threaten me with imminent death if I spanked you again."  
   
He expects her to giggle again, or frown, or punch at him playfully. Instead, she places a hand on his shoulder and pushes him back gently until she can see his face at close quarters. Hers was made pliant by the evening’s exertions: he reads it like a birthday card, a second before her eyes light up with a devil-may-care glint. The next moment, she has flipped onto her stomach, her face still upturned with a daring grin, and she is hitching the red billowing skirt back up her hips.  
   
Mycroft draws in a sharp breath.  
   
But his lungs are still claiming air as he looks down on the slender thighs, the all-too-visible rise and curve of her buttocks under the triangle of black cotton, and tries to shake his head. This is all wrong. It’s the wrong time, the wrong age, the wrong urge – and as he clutches at  _wrong_ , Sherlock’s face turns rigid, her mouth suddenly naked under the fading lipstick, and he knows what she’s thinking.  _Odd. Freak. Is it me? Is it something wrong with me?_  
   
The force of protective love has driven up his hand before he knows it, landing it with a neat tap on Sherlock’s right buttock. "Count with me," he says. "Sherlock. Celebrate with me."  
   
"One", Sherlock answers, and Mycroft’s fingertips linger over the curve of flesh before he turns to her left hemisphere. Two, three. Four they speak together and five lands on the back of her thighs with a chance grace, now Mycroft has closed his eyes. Eight. Nine, the fireworks crepitate over the Cam as he goes on spanking her, each slap a notch harder, a loss of innocence. Boyish fragile legs, white arrows pointing him to her adorable bottom. Twelve, Mycroft whispers hard, and rests his cupped hand over its new dominion in a – blessing? A claim? Fifteen, Sherlock taunts back, and fifteen is another flash, the unquiet memory of Mummy’s voice in the library. Mycroft accepts it, pushes it aside. Eighteen, nineteen, the flat of his hand across her hidden crack, releasing a puff of breath from her, almost a moan, and they know this has to end, and neither wants the end.  
   
Twenty-one goes unsaid. Mycroft's hand drops to his side, slack and tingling, and searches Sherlock's gaze.  
   
Sherlock is smiling. _To the victors the spoils._  
   
He smoothes the red folds over her thighs again, slowly, almost reverently. He lies down on the earth next to her, white tie be damned. She lets him gather her into his arms, still wordless, and he tightens the embrace in terror and wonder, no longer certain if he should protect her against herself, him, or the indiscernible years to come.  
   
In the distance, the celebration carries on.

* * *

  
   
4\. Mid-fall, such an apropos wording.  
   
Not that his eyes can fall on much in the room. A bed, a chair, walls that are a clean sweep of plaster (pictures equal pins, equal nails), white blinds over a window too high for Sherlock to climb, even balanced on the chair on the balls of her feet. The shivers have already crashed Sherlock twice to the ground, but she spat out the pills; said it was payoff for their piss-poor logic, wanting her clean and confiscating her shampoo ten minutes after she’d signed in.  
   
Now she’s on the chair, folded behind her legs like a slender pocket-knife, her head pinioned between her fists. Still in her soft cotton pyjamas, looking down at the floor and Mycroft knows that she’s learnt every swirl and eye ingrained in the wood and failed to coax a story out of them. She is speaking, but her throat is swollen so that the words come out half air, half grit; he doesn’t catch them at first.  
   
" _No ostrich lives on mince pies. No fruit, grown in the shade, is ripe. No teachable kitten has green eyes_."  
   
Ah. Lewis Carroll’s logic puzzles. Or rather, their negative premises, strung together and left dangling over the ground without rhyme or reason. Mycroft sighs.  
   
" _None of my saucepans are of the slightest use. No ostrich lives on honey. No ducks waltz_."  
   
"You could at least let the quotation fit the sin. Since you probably told the nurse that  _illogical persons are despised_ , why not remind me that no fat fish can dance a minuet?  
   
" _Nobody – is despised – who can manage a crocodile_." Sherlock’s voice claws at the words. Twelve hours, it has been twelve hours, the doctors told Mycroft, and if she doesn’t sleep within the next they will have to sedate her and put the rehab on hold.  
   
"Nice try." Mycroft raises an eyebrow, still leaning against the door pannel. "But this is not how things work and you know it. I’m not killing your crocodile for you, Sher. You do, and then I pull you out of marshland. It will be London again and you won’t have to be a teacher, I promise, I’ll take care of things —"  
   
" _Nothing in this cupboard, that is cracked, will hold water_."  
   
"It will if you stop gabbling and grab some sleep. Is that asking too much? You know what lack of sleep does to the human brain. Is that what you want? Is it? Answer me, Sherlock! The supreme thrill, burning down the lab not with a bang but a whimper?"  
   
"I  _c-c-can’t_!" Oh god, the shivers are back, rocking her hard enough for the chair’s metallic legs to scrape against the wood. "It’s been going on and on and on and on, and when I try to stop, my head goes numb. It was the other way when I t-t-took, and then I could think with my skin, could feel every atom of blood passing through my heart, through my brain, and, Mycroft, it was stunning. But M-Mother said I’d be the death of her, and now nothing feels but my voice, and that's going too, and there's nothing I can think of, nothing, and  _I don’t know what to do_!"  
   
Her cry tears at his pose, rips it apart unseen, and he knows, only then, what he has to do.  
  
He crosses over to her bed, sitting, hitching up his trousers legs. She follows each move with blurred attention. "Sherlock, listen to me. We have twelve, no, fourteen minutes."  
   
She tries to focus on his words, nods. "The clock in the nurses’ room —"  
   
" — is a tad sluggish." He feels a rush of pride at her words. She looks like a hawk, a ravaged species, her pale eyes mostly reflecting their white environment; but they are of the same blood, he and she, and she can still fly her rounds.

"Yes. Enough for us to try something. Come over here."


	2. Chapter 2

She looks at him, lost-eyed, and it takes the sum of his will not to dismiss the gap in two strides and wrap his arms around her shaking form. Instead, Mycroft holds out a hand and speaks carefully. "Twenty-one."  
   
He sees how she reaches out for the word, turns it over in the numb hollow of her mind, and suddenly his hand is grasped. He uses it to tug her to his side, shifting the hold to his other hand as he bends her over his knees, coaxing her to stretch along the edge of the bed. "Yes," she is whispering to their joined hands. "Do it to me. Do it now. You’re the only... yes. Yes. Bare me and make me alive, Mycroft."  
   
A firm squeeze to her hand before he disengages his fingers so they can brush a tender path down the runnel of her back. The shudders merge into the path, until they’re a mere twitch of her hips as he craddles them between his hands, tucking his thumbs deep into the waistband of her pyjamas. They press into cool flesh, telling Sherlock that, yes, sensation is within touch, before Mycroft lowers the pyjamas over her buttocks. The limp cotton bunches up in his hands as he pulls them slowly, carefully, their elastic band nestling briefly into the crease of her thighs before they go down all the way to her knees.  
   
Naked bodies are familiar to him... at second hand. In his peculiar arena, there are only so many steps warranted to trip an adversary, and sexual shaming is the oldest, surest move known to his sort. Therefore, there is nothing about the female half of flesh that a reliable infrared camera hasn't taught Mycroft.  
   
But no picture, however exact, could have prepared him for Sherlock in the flesh.  
   
It stirs him to the core. There she is, as no one (he knows, wants to know for a fact) has watched her yet – her tender verso exposed at the crest of its androgynous beauty, soft rounded cheeks giving the lie to her nervous thighs even as they tauten in anticipation. It comes to him in a white rush, this sight of her, flooding his heart and his groin together. And Mycroft knows it for what it is. The predator, he thinks in angry shame, has been raised in her protector – and so he pushes Sherlock off-center on his hardening lap.  
   
Her hand catches his ankle, clutches in a brave attempt to stabilize herself. Before the next instant can begin, Mycroft’s arm swoops down.

The first smack is a small deflagration in the silent room.  
   
( _All the better if she is upended: the dizziness will cloud her mind to –_ )  
   
He watches the colour pool up where the sharp pat landed on her buttock cheek, his head swirled by the sight. Shocking-pink, they used to call it, but he calls it _sensation_ , breaking through to her finally, finally! in the shape of his hand. Shocked, elated, he smiles at the warm patch; he brings his arm back and down again, deflowering her other cheek. Then again, and again, left, right, up, down, Neat blows they are, quick and loud, sifting sweet-sharp warmth on her resilient flesh as they connect across her tender crack spread horizontally under Mycroft’s eyes.  _Your bottom is smiling at me_ , he finds himself thinking, and laughs out, knowing for certain that they’re both beyond the power of thought. Even his erection is no longer a matter of concern, merely a sign that he’s sharing in Sherlock’s aliveness. She is breathing her moans at him, now; tightening her grip on him, during the long, restless, glorious minutes through which he spanks her, so that she can clench her spine, cant her hips and meet the kiss of his hand.  
   
Mycroft’s hand remembers; Mycroft’s hand dives. Mycroft exults.  
   
 _Do you feel the swish of cool air before the burn, sister mine, wind where there was a void? Are your pupils finally dilated? Are we out of the cold chamber, you and I?_  
   
When the eleventh minute melts into the heat, Mycroft stops. He wraps his other arm around her thighs and pulls her back so she  can stretch herself out on the bed again. If he had a choice, he would take another minute to rest his cheek against her once pale flesh, now radiating like a hot, red-rose sorbet. He would close his eyes, he knows; and warm himself on the tender, the magnificent bonfire of her spanked buttocks.  
  
Instead, he looks at the dark head burrowing face first into the pillows. Silence creeps up into the warmth.  
   
He pulls Sherlock’s pyjamas up carefully and proceeds to unhitch himself from her, tucking the duvet around her limp body. Her breathing has gone deeper, slower. Mycroft rises and switches the white lamp off on the bedside table.

The twelfth minute is seeing him to the door when Sherlock turns around and says, "You won’t tell me that you’re in love with me."  
   
Her voice is as clear-keyed as three months ago, when it was her turn to say "I’m not telling you."  
   
His is its impeccable self when he makes it answer. "Should I? My feeling for you is one of its kind; love is an all-purpose word. You love being clever. Father loved us. I love sultana cake. Mummy loves her bit of peace. Love is — love is an umbrella term, Sherlock. It wasn't made for the likes of us."  
   
He lowers his eyes and waits but there’s nothing, not a sound in the room until the timid knock and the nurse’s hushed rumble. "What, is she asleep now? Oh, Doctor will be _so_ pleased, we’ve been all so worried about her, poor thing. You’ve talked some sense in her, then, well done, and none too soon. Strike while the iron is hot, is what I say. Shall I take you to Doctor now, sir?"  
 

* * *

  
5\. Midnight the hour of crime, and never was Mycroft so tempted to prove the saying true.

Whoever convinced their new chairman to make it a Happy Hour of talking among the club’s members was either a moron or Diogenes' true spiritual heir. Mycroft’s misanthropy has increased tenfold since he was buttonholed by the Hon. Robert Doherty for a one-to-one tutorial on the impending extinction of the bluefin tuna. Doherty may be a credit to the Royal Entomological Society, but all he has done so far on behalf of his protégé is to make Mycroft drink like a fish.  
   
Mycroft is trying to find a suitable reply to the scientist’s claim that he (Mycroft) ask the Duchess of Cambridge to promote beetroot sushi for the Cause when he is saved by the gong. The gong buzzes out of his breastpocket – Happy Hour equates Mobile Movida Hour – giving him a perfect alibi for escape.  
   
"My mother," Mycroft intones devoutly, showing Doherty the screen filled with a capitalized MUMMIE, and scuttles out into the corridor. Thank goodness, a previous martyr to the Hour has left a window open (prior to jumping, no doubt) and Mycroft leans into the crisp winter air gratefully as he takes the call.  
   
"Why, hullo Mummie. What a nice surprise. I must say that for the minutest minute, I thought you were the other Holmes. The predictable one." Mycroft smiles grimly at his glass. "Who might have checked her mother’s new prescription for sedatives before she derouted a private number."  
   
There is a gratifying pause on the active end of the call.  
   
"Blocking your texts means I’m not in a talking mood, Sherlock. In fact, I’m only taking your call because —"  
   
"— you’re bored and more than a little drunk." Yet his voice is pitch-perfect, as always. How did she — oh. The ice cubes, you dunce. Mycroft settles his glass carefully on the window sill. "And still angry at me."  
   
He lets his silence answer this.  
   
A faint crinkling sound. She’s lighting a cigarette, which she will hold between her third and fourth fingers, a trick he’s seen her practise on a number of screen footages. Two years ago, waiting for Lestrade before NSY, she faced the camera full-on and - slowly, slowly, like a lover's farewell kiss - touched her fingers to her mouth for a draw. Oh, how it had seared him then, the childish, agonizing image of her smoking like that, with the older man at her side, and he had summoned the DI for a little talk the very next day. A reckless move but, in the little black book of Mycroft's deeds, a winner.  
   
"You are angry because of what he said. About burning me."  
   
Mycroft’s gaze takes in the night view open to him. London’s serrated rooflines, red clay gone argent above the shadowland. Night to night showeth knowledge. He no longer hears the misanthrops’ chatter oozing from the bar, nor the smoky call of ravens across the Thames. He only hears her voice, making him sober, making him hard. Making him wait.  
   
He wonders if Jim Moriarty’s words did the same to her when he wooed her with sound and fury, and sends the glass shattering inaudibly fifteen feet lower.  
   
"So I'm right? That's why you won’t talk to me? Not because I... dated him, all right, and let on about BeePee on my site, and that was betrayal, yes, but that’s what we  _do_ , you telling Lestrade about the drugs, me fucking up your State secrets. That's our game. Was our game. Before he came."  
   
His treacherous mind wills him to see her, barefoot, kneeling in black silk pyjamas before the fireplace in her quaint Victorian Gothic flat, the hot red spot poised over her lips as she speaks.  
   
"But he’s a fool if he thinks he can tell how I burn."  
   
 _Burn_. Now he sees her pink erectile lips touching each other, flesh on moist flesh, before they part on a soft burst of air.  _Burn_  is a match struck far too deep into the dark chamber of his lust. "Don’t," Mycroft says softly, warningly, turning aside from the window and its share of cold sky. "You’re going to have to hang up now, Sherlock. Call Anthea and check with her if you need to – "  
   
"I’ve spoken to Anthea. She says you’re leaving England tomorrow and I can’t wait till your return, I need you now."  
   
"I can’t see you now."  
   
There is no pause where he expected none. Only the frame of hard wood against his spine, a reminder of the Club’s stolid materialism as he slides down to squat on his heels, perspiration clamming his face and palms. The hardness will help if he can give it a name, Mycroft thinks, pressing the back of his head against the wall. His lips part of their own accord. "Black oak."  
   
"...Is that what you see? Carved panels, then, if that place is as period as you like to let on. Black oak, thick wood, likely to muffle every sound in every closeted room. All right, we’ll start with the oak. Look at the wall facing you, Mycroft."  
   
Mycroft squeezes his eyes against the sweat and looks at the wall. Its panel, as befits the Diogenists’ addiction to period gloom, holds an alabaster sconce casting a pale, elongated halo down the length of wood.  
   
"Are you seeing the wall? Good. Now look at me."  
   
Mycroft's eyes stay open. The wall stands; the long halo whitens.  
   
"I’m standing before you, face to the wall. See? I’m making this easy for you. Black on black – as of yet. Turtleneck sweater, wraparound skirt knotted on my left hip. Did you know there are fifty-eight classified knots in the world, falling into three generic classes? Bend, hitch and fast. Yes, the serial hanging case. Such sensuous names, brother mine. Bend. Hitch. _Fast_."  
   
Mycroft contracts his lips together and cradles a hand over his groin, keeping it loose.  
   
"I’m not bending down. Not tonight, not in that place. But I’m pushing my hands to the wall, my naked hands, splayed apart, seeking the hard cold touch. Yours is more subtle as you stand behind me, your fingers just where I want them, toying with the hitch knot on my hip. But I need more. I need closer. Tug at the knot, Mycroft, and my skirt will pool into your hands, all of it, still warm on the inside. It will leave me upright, stretched and naked from the waist down, craving for your hand's comeback. Are you seeing me?"  
   
"I always see you," Mycroft murmurs to the pale fire.  
   
"Good. Because I’m turning my head now. I need to – see you first. As you take it off."

A pause.

"Oh yes, you know what I mean. Do it. Please, please. Bare your hand for me, Mycroft."  
   
He looks down, stretches his hand out on his thigh. The gold band encircling his ring finger is as thin as his memory of the petite blonde who put it there, five years ago, two before she walked out of their high-functioning beige bunker in Hampstead. He does recall her saying "Surely you  don’t need an umbrella to get married?", which soon morphed into "Surely you need to do something about these work hours?" and "Surely there are pills you could take?". Until all the _Surelys_ stopped, after his control tour in Uzbekistan and his young Uzbek guide, Alisher, black-curled and excessively clear-sighted under his black fringe of lashes. His one mistake.  
   
The ring hits the floor, runs an elliptic curve and vanishes into the shadow. Mycroft waits.  
   
"Thanks," Sherlock whispers, her lower tones wavering in the lightest of halts. "Now you can raise your hand. Raise it high enough that I see it, hear it as it swerves, and make the blow as hard as you can. I want to remember it tomorrow. Carry the hot stamp of it on my flesh, making it hum with sensation. Oh God. Please, Mycroft, please. I have to – it has to be tonight."  
   
The air spills out of him like a sob. "Sherlock – "  
   
"And it’s not like you’d give me anything else. All right.  _All right_. It all connects, in a sense – this and us. God, the feel of your hand coming and going, and all I can think is, they’re the same, his hand and he. Drawing away into thin air only to loom back, close,  _close_ , and you burning all the rest out of of me. Harder, higer, faster, till I'm lost in the glow, the high of it, until you stop to turn me around and kiss at the saline on my cheeks. Kiss it, lick it. Why don't you? You could lick any salt of mine, Mycroft, and you know it. Fuck. I’m gripping the handle so hard my knuckles have gone white. Listen."  
   
And he listens, as his phone clogs with tiny noises, faraway and sharp. Crows calling, a faint counterpart to the sounds he can still pick from the opening of sky above his head. A distant klaxon in a trickle of traffic.  
   
 _I have spoken to Anthea_. Has she, indeed. She never was at home, he thinks. She’s in the car, a lane or two away, holding the door open to let him know how close she is, with only the night air and Anthea's silent guardianship between them. Anthea. Ever since the Cambridge years, Mycroft has sensed a tight ripple of understanding between the two girls, and wondered where he stood in this female comradeship. But Anthea’s loyalty is the one unshakable prop in his life, more solid than the centenarian wall behind him. If Sherlock is using her to get at him, what follows is not that Anthea has turned traitor, but that Sherlock’s manipulation, in all its Holmesian twists and turns, is yet another token of faith.  
   
It is enough to make him accept that he has lost the upper hand tonight. If he's ever had it.  
   
"Give me five minutes," Mycroft says, and ends the call.  
 

* * *

  
  
The key to the Swift Cabinet gleams like a talisman in the moonlit back garden. He looks down at the notches and grooves, the delicate reliefs of metal that will fit exactly into the lock, marrying shape to similar, opposite shape.

He waits for her to come.  
 

* * *

  
+1.  
   
Midday, or so he infers from the sudden drop in the rattlesnake of traffic on Whitehall and the presence of a plate of lettuce at his elbow. The batavia leaves are a brilliant chartreuse under his desk lamp – Mycroft is scanning a series of slides, courriered along with his lunch plate – as if trying their honest best to pimp themselves and the tomato slices in their lap.  
   
Mycroft ignores the plate and focuses on his slides. Each shows the same war landscape, thinned out to a few lines and shadows, and sprinkled liberally with round patches of blue indicating potential task forces. "Bubble bath time," his last and most cynical minder once commented. "They’ll want you to provide half the bubbles and foot the bill for the hot water  _and_  the plastic toy duck. Your answer is to pop the bubbles and show them their poor little privates underwater, pink and shrivelling, then settle for twice the foam and half the bill. Elementary, my dear Holmes."  
   
Mycroft’s mind has been trained to flick from one blue graph to another, but today he finds it less easy to ignore the facts beneath the shapes – all the nameless young men, here and across the sea, waiting to know if they’ll be flown to the sanitized warscape under his eyes. They bring up his own waiting, his own fear, every heartbeat a compact thud now that four days have elapsed since Anthea’s text.  
   
 _S vanished. Escaped surv Monday morning 4: 28, possibly seen boarding the first Eurostar. Investigation in Paris inconclusive so far._  
   
How could he miss it?  
   
How could he not see – blind, self-satisfied, idiotic fool – that she’d come the night before, crashing his own defence zone, his dusty, all-male protectorate in her hour of need, not because he was leaving but she was?  
   
To go after Moriarty. (The dark radiant shapes well out of focus as the war gazes back at Mycroft.) Who else? But she’d gone to him first, and he’ll be sure to tell the madman so before giving him a taste of his own pain. Even now, the pang is like blood in Mycroft’s throat: that this was farewell, this was Sherlock sealing their flesh in fire before she let the night swallow her again. Knowing she’d take this into next day’s battlefield – the pain-pleasure, still a palpable hit, and the reassurance, hard upon the pain, that she could feel. That he could still make her feel.  
  
Holy Christ in hell, _why didn’t she tell him_?  
   
"Sir —"  
   
He comes back to the small patch of screen and the larger frame of light, where Anthea stands in the doorway, her BlackBerry held out uncertainly.  
   
"We’ve received...but the number is blocked and I can’t make out the code. Numbers only."  
   
It takes a mere beat for his blood to rise in his heart. Yet Mycroft remains seated, his head slightly angled, as if he’d just been asked to make his choice between cheese and pudding. He is waiting for the moment to pass. When his heart contracts again, the pulse leaving a cold, familiar undertow of anger, he’s already thinking. Numbers. Puzzles, algorithms, equations: the bastard showing his flush hand. Fine, then. Meet him on his own turf. Government Code and Cypher? No, too risky, and there'll be a time limit. Games theory. Nash equilibrium. Make his gain his bloody cost.  
   
Mycroft pushes his chair back, computing what he knows of the man and his connection to Sherlock. Four suicides, five if she’d taken that pill. "Read it to me." Five pips. Five days since their night, and how many nights in the madman’s hold? "I said, read it to me! What are you waiting for?"

   
"Twenty-one, full stop. Forty-six, forty-t –  _Mr Holmes!_ "  
   
Her arm is about him as he fumbles with his breath, abandoning his weight to her, waiting for the solid planes and lines of the office to gather once more around him. No one had told him that joy would feel so close to fear, the same strong beat tightening his heart into a closed fist. "She’s alive," he tells Anthea’s face when it looms up again before him, silent and white-lipped, and something clatters to the ground next to the toppled chair.  
   
"Sherlock? " she whispers, bending to retrieve her phone. As he takes it out of her hand, he can smell the tang of her hair spray.  
   
"46, 42, 49... that’s her longitude she’s giving us, smart girl, and the next series must be the latitude. She’s still in France – no, Switzerland by the look of it. And the rest, my dear, is silence."  
   
"Yes, sir."  
   
They’re past the point where their own codes should enter the dance – plan this, level that, clearance so-and-so. Silence means a Black Hawk, the stealth helicopter designed for that same game of war she has interrupted, two men from Mycroft’s innermost inner circle, medication, and clearing an invisible gap in the afternoon’s agenda. Something she’s doing even as she passes back into the light, shutting the door behind her.  
   
Alone in the dark room, he draws in his breath, once, twice, taking a strange comfort in the fruity scent she’s left behind. Then turns back to face the screen.  _Plus ça change_ , Mycroft thinks silently, and settles to pick the slide he was given one hour to select. The image which could be the making of peace or make everything else worse than ever.  
 

* * *

  
Sherlock's numbers take them past Bern, to a high altitude plateau and a trail of waterfalls. Even in May, the air is too cold for visitors to linger much and the scene is practically deserted as they trace ring after widening ring high above it.

There hasn’t been another text.  
   
Mycroft, gazing down at the grassy, stony ground, allows each ring to take him on a roundabout of memories. Never fighting the images as they tumble into his mind, unruled, disordered, all of Sherlock. Here is three-year Sherlock asking  _How do you know your eyes are blue, they're in your head and you can’t see your head_ ; and there is an older Sherlock asking about glow-worms, babies and  _if blue and yellow make green, why isn’t the sky green all round the sun, My_? A crosswind swings the helicopter into a new ring; the images widen. Sherlock whirling in his arms, Sherlock tugging the belt of her coat tight on the other side of a grave, lighting her virgin cigarette with Father’s old lighter, her eyes daring him to comment. Sherlock, sister, freak, foe, nighthawk, chaste streetwalker, his sorrow and his pride.

   
So many Sherlocks lost and found as they expanded into the wrecked, wonderful girl they’re searching. But always the same, always Sherlock at the core, like the multicoloured fractals she used to cut out of  _New Scientist_  and pin to her bedroom walls. Broken, beautiful ellipses.  
   
"Hay barn on our left, sir. I don’t think it’s used: there’s no cattle around and some are built only for the tourist’s eyes. Bit of local colour, like. Shall we?"  
   
Mycroft nods. The last ring gaps into a spiral, hurrying them down and down, and as he closes his eyes, it gives him Sherlock as he saw her last. Shoulders arched, face turned back to face him, parting her lips under the tears in that tilted smile of hers, half-gamine half-Sphynx, as he pressed his two hands to her burning rump.  
   
All he can feel now is gratitude for their bizarre ritual. One that reaches back to the time of innocence, when protecting her was still a child’s game, one that has brought back his sister to him, again and again in the full flush of sensitivity, warm and winning, and  _alive_.  
   
His men’s cries go unheeded as he runs the few yards across the field, his Oxford shoes bumping against the clods of grass, never stopping until he reaches the barn door and prises it open.  
   
And there is his  _femme fractale._ Levering herself up against the back wall to greet him standing, her left foot oddly twisted inward, her mouth a combative pout as it breathes out a puff of white smoke into the air.  
   
Mycroft takes two strides, pins her to the wall, parts his lips and swallows her breath into his mouth.  
   
He feels Sherlock’s gasp more than he hears it, and straightaway the slender mouth opens, eager and moist, yielding the warm inside seam of her lips and the warmer touch of her tongue to his. The kiss falters; deepens; until they’re pressed against each other, her arm looped round his neck, his knee tucked firmly between her legs, half-supporting her weight, and he breaks the kiss only to murmur "Please tell me he’s been killed."  
   
Sherlock’s answer is typical. "He’s dead.  _I_ was nearly killed. And my phone fell in with him, you’ll have to get me a new one, his is an iPhone and I don’t do iPhones, the megapixels —"  
   
This time, Mycroft kisses her to shut her up. It feels just as right as before.

* * *

  
The ride back to London sees them folded into one seat, her leg stretched over his lap for Anthea to tend her ankle while she utters a steady list of requests, from a first-class funeral for herself to the fatal coda "And you tell Mummie".  
   
"Anything," Mycroft says. When she falls silent, he understands that the promise extends well past a blank cheque on his (admittedly vast) power funds.  
   
Later on, she rests her head on his shoulder and says, "You know, I really thought I was in for a good wallop when I saw you."  
   
Mycroft smiles, but doesn’t answer. The late-afternoon sea stretches beneath them, urging them home, the English coast still drowned in a haze of western light. Holding her, he presses his head back against the pane of glass. In this, and in this only, he thinks, what matters isn’t their blindness, the wrong or the wicked of them, whatever others say. Sherlock’s head grows heavier under his chin and he lifts a hand to stroke it.  
   
What matters is their light.


End file.
